Danny’s Story: A Fourth Day I Wish I Could Forget (reprise)

So, I posted on here once before; back then, my post was titled “Three Days They Probably Won’t Remember, And That I Wish I Could Forget.” Now, I have a fourth story to add.

To recap what the last three stories were:

1. My nonbinary ex-partner would always push for too much, ask for more than I was willing to give. I told them I wasn’t comfortable doing that much, but they never listened to me.

2. I was admitted to an adolescent, residential mental health facility. While I was there, another patient, a girl younger than me, kissed me in a group room, then came into my room (she wasn’t my roommate) and proceeded to make out with me, bite hickeys into my neck (I usually describe them to people as having been “similar to the bolts in the Frankenstein monster’s neck”), and then left before she could get caught, and before she could get farther than laying on top of me on my bathroom floor.

3. After being released from the residential mental health facility, I went back to college classes on the campus I’d been at before, and a custodian who I’d been friends(?) with started talking to me one morning, asking if I liked “adult movies.” I thought he meant R-rated. Instead, he showed me porn on his phone, asking “do you like?”.

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So, now for story number four.

4. The week after I turned 18, I was feeling confident and empowered by the idea of being a legal adult. I decided to join Grindr, because I’m gay, and I wanted to see if I could find someone. I’m not sure exactly what I was looking for, to be completely honest, but I got contacted by a gay man in his 40s, who wanted to meet. He didn’t have any pictures of himself, but I wasn’t being resonable, and I just decided that I would meet him anyway.

We met at his apartment (again, I didn’t think this through at all), and we were in his room watching a movie. (A kid’s movie, to be specific.) He asked some questions about me being transgender/nonbinary (“I crossdress, you know,” he’d told me), and then he started trying to kiss me, make out with me, and convince me to have sex with him because I’d told him about my past experiences with relationships, and he told me I “deserve someone who cares” to show me how good it can be.

I kept telling him no, but he kept pushing, telling me “you’re so beautiful, I’ve never been in love with a girl before, but you’re special, Daniella.” (My name is very much not Daniella, it’s Daniel. Daniel is my chosen name, my real name, and even my birth name isn’t Daniella.)

I finally told him that I needed to leave, and I left, laughing the experience off later as just “bad choices” on my part.

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The hardest part now is that I still sometimes blame myself or hate myself for what happened, that people’s comments and opinions have stuck with me long enough that I can’t seem to shake them.

Because if m ex-partner was that bad, why couldn’t I leave? Why did I stay with someone who didn’t listen to me, or respect me? Why didn’t I walk away?

And if I hadn’t wanted that girl making out with me in residential treatment, why didn’t I say something? Why didn’t I verbally say no? Why did I let her kiss me? And If I was older than her, how can it be her fault? Shouldn’t I somehow have been the more responsible one?

And how could I have been so stupid as to misunderstand what that custodian had meant by an “adult movie”?

And if I was the one dumb enough to go over to someone’s apartment that I didn’t even know, didn’t even have a picture of, isn’t it my fault? Shouldn’t I have been smart enough not to do something so dangerous, so stupid?

And there really are days where I believe myself, and treat myself with the respect any person deserves, but. Sometimes. Sometimes, I still can’t shake the feeling of self-hatred and self-blame that I have about all of these memories. And I feel so bad about it, because it feels like nothing that happened to me should have been that bad, like I should have just gotten over this shit by now, but I haven’t, and I can’t, and I’m just so tired. I’m just so overwhelmed.

And I can’t help thinking about how I’m just some statistic now, one more “% of transgender people who have been sexually assaulted” or “% of gay people who have been sexually assaulted” or “% of mentally ill people who have been sexually assaulted” or any other category I fit in, and it’s just so exhausting. I just want to know if this is going to keep happening. If I’m just destined to keep having experiences like these, or if it’s my fault because at some point isn’t it my fault if this keeps happening to me? Like the whole “if all your relationships are terrible maybe it’s not the other person that’s the problem”?

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